CODEWITHSUNDEEP
dockerwindows-subsystem-for-linux
phydeauxman
phydeauxman

Reputation: 1712

Unable to access Docker container running in WSL2

I am new to containers and Docker. On my Windows 10 laptop (Version 20H2 Build 19042.630) I have WSL2 installed as well as Docker Desktop (Docker Engine v19.03.13). When I run the command below (from the docker documentation):

docker run -d -p 80:80 docker/getting-started

The container starts fine but I am unable to access the container from either within WSL or from the Windows 10 host.

Inside WSL, if I enter curl http://127.0.0.1 it returns the error curl: (7) Failed to connect to 127.0.0.1 port 80: Connection refused

From the Windows 10 host, if I open a browser and attempt to go to http://127.0.0.1 it just throws a 404 error.

From the Windows 10 host, when I open the Docker Desktop app, it shows the container running and listening on port 80 but if I then stop the container...and then attempt to restart it, it throws an error that says:

(HTTP code 500) server error - Ports are not available: listen tcp 0.0.0.0:80: bind: An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions

I have tried completely uninstalling WSL and Docker Desktop and resetting the TCP/IP stack but the end result is the same. I performed the exact same install steps on my desktop PC and everything works fine with no issues. I did notice on the desktop PC that the first time I tried accessing the "getting-started" container that it produced a pop-up to allow the traffic through my firewall. I never got this on the laptop. I compared the firewall rules on the PC to the Laptop and the PC had 4 rules for the com.docker.backed application that the Laptop did not have. I manually duplicated those rules on the laptop but it did not change the behavior any.

EDIT:

After doing more research on this issue...discovered why this is happening. The ports the container is attempting to listen on are excluded for my Laptop. Found the Github issue linked below that had the command netsh interface ipv4 show excludedportrange protocol=tcp that showed the list of excluded ports on my laptop. Seems Hyper-V is what is excluding the ports but the only reason Hyper-V is on the system is for WSL. The Github issue is still open as of today.

Unable to bind ports: Docker-for-Windows & Hyper-V excluding but not using important port ranges #3171

Upvotes: 7

Views: 11726

Answers (2)

Ankur
Ankur

Reputation: 2207

In my case, I was able to find out the IP Address of WSL via the command : wsl hostname -I

I used that IP with the exposed port of the existing docker container and it worked for me.

Upvotes: 1

Moro
Moro

Reputation: 939

If your docker container uses localhost inside it won't work. I had the same issue with docker inside wsl and the solution was to change IP of underlying service (the one that is run inside docker) to 0.0.0.0.

You can check this by doing docker ps. In my case I ran the docker like this:

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 hello-python

which was then bind to (part of docker ps output):

0.0.0.0:8080->8080/tcp

So basically the python code had to use 0.0.0.0:8080 instead of localhost:8080

Upvotes: 1

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